Dartmouth College Library Bulletin

Wandering Thoughts on the
Sephardim and Their Language, Ladino

SOL LEVENSON

SINCE childhood my concept of a Jew had been limited by my 3 family origins in
Eastern Europe. The only Jews I knew were Yiddish speakers, some of whom also
spoke either Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, or Russian and, in my mother's
family, uncles, aunts, and cousins who spoke Yiddish and Rumanian. Not all of
them spoke similarly-accented Yiddish, and sometimes certain words had to be
defined but, by and large, Yiddish was the lingua franca that held the various
communities together.

I remember comments about Sephardic Jews, mostly in glowing references to
Supreme Court Justices Brandeis and Cardozo. In my family's circle of friends
only these two were identified as Sephardic Jews who were Spanish. However, the
large colony of Sephardic Jews in a neighboring town, mostly laborers and
artisans, were called 'Turks,' in spite of their self-identification as
Spanish. For the most part they were a mysterious people to me, and even after
I met some of them in the middle years of my life, they remained a people
apart, Jews who were not REAL JEWS, because they spoke Ladino (another mystery)
instead of Yiddish.

In the winter of 1984 I began to collect information for a series of lectures
that I eventually delivered, in Spanish, in Medellín, Colombia, in 1987.
Much of my research and writing was initiated in the reference room of Baker
Library and in the Spanish section of the stacks. It was in those stacks that I
happened upon a wonderful collection of Sephardic literature. There is enough
information on those shelves about the Sephardim and their language to answer
most of a scholar's needs.

The first of the works to which I was attracted and to which I frequently
return is a dissertation written by a young cleric, Damián Alonso
Garcia, when he was a doctoral candidate at El Institute Católico de
Paris. Its title is Literatura oral del ladino entre los sefardíes de
oriente a través del romancero (Madrid: 1970).

In his 'Presentación' the author tells us that when he was around
fifteen years old he came across a fascicule of some one hundred pages entitled
'Judíos españoles' (Spanish Jews). He found this simple title
intriguing because in his studies of Spanish history there had been passing
references to a learned Jewish community that had flourished during the Middle
Ages, had left the country and, he had supposed, had disappeared through the
course of time.

I quote, in part, how this little tract affected young Damián: 'To read
those enchanted stories, in a sweet and singing Ladino . . . was for me the
summit of emotion . . . a people, I thought, of which Spain had rid itself. . .
so badly mistreated . . . in spite of which [it] continues to be faithful to
its language, its customs, and its civilization.' He continues, 'Now there are
thousands of those Spaniards without a country who have returned to their dear
Spain, singing in an archaic, ingenuous but gentle and sweet Spanish...those
stories that once upon a time their ancestors took with them into exile, which
for generations afterwards their descendants had saved, like cloth-wrapped gold
in the "treasure chests of the mind," as one says in good Ladino.' 1

I found this sensitivity to the Sephardim and to Ladino typical of the other
works I studied, and since there is so much unanimity among the scholars, I
shall limit my references to Sr. Damián Alonso's thesis and to an
earlier work, Los israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano, by
Angel Pulido y Fernandez (Madrid: 1904).

Ladino is, as the young Damián described it, an archaic language. It is
largely fifteenth-century Spanish that lost direct contact with the parent
language, thus acquiring elements of another language or languages, depending
on the country or countries in which the exiles ultimately settled. In the past
four hundred years there has been enough contact between the exiled communities
so that those who speak Ladino have maintained a language that has a common
grammatical structure and basic vocabulary for all speakers. The same can be
said of Yiddish speakers, who also have a language, a literature, and a grammar
in common. However, the Sephardim have been able to pass on to their
descendants their mother tongue, whereas we Ashkenazis (Yiddish speakers) began
to lose our mother tongue with the first-born generation in the United States.
Yiddish is, according to some authorities, eleventh-century German, adulterated
by the language(s) spoken in whatever country a Jewish community settled. Lucy
S. Dawidowicz, writing about the 1940 census in Commentary, says, 'Only
3 per cent of those who gave Yiddish as the language spoken at home in their
earliest childhood were third generation.' 2

As I continued to study the literature of the Sephardim and the scholarly
commentaries on their works, there grew an image of them in my mind, an image
of their place and their significance in Spanish history. Besides making
outstanding original contributions in literature, philosophy, and science, the
Sephardim were the major translators into Spanish of Arabic works on medicine,
mathematics, and the sciences. Here I translate directly from page 233 in the
Damián Alonso Garcia work: 'Spain is the only country of the Diaspora in
which the Jews were completely integrated and in which their genius gave of
itself everything of which it was capable, influencing, as I have mentioned
several times, in a very decisive manner, Castilian development and the Spanish
Golden Age ... It is also very significant that only in Spain did they create a
lively architecture, with original ornamental motifs, even in harmony with
Islamic art. Hence it is not strange that when they were expelled they felt
just as Spanish as the Christians.' The Diaspora to which he refers dates from
the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans, in 70 A.D.

As for the Sephardic contribution to Spanish literature, this is what Sr.
Damián Alonso says on page 21: `Cervantes, in the fourth book of "La
Galatea," interposes a conversation of Love and Beauty between the sensible
Tirsi and the coldhearted Lenio. The sense of this conversation is entirely
Platonic and derives from León Hebreo to the very last words, in a way
that enables us to state that there is nothing original to be found in them.
The Marcela scene in "Don Quijote," in front of the shepherds and Don Quijote,
reminds us of "La Galatea," thus equally inspired by León Hebreo. And
all this love of Don Quijote which he professes in such Platonic terms, is this
not also inspired largely by the "Dialogues of Love" by León Hebreo?'

During my lecture series in Colombia, I was fortunate indeed to meet Manuel
Mejía Vallejo, one of that country's outstanding poets. He had just
returned from Spain, where he had had a long conference with the head of the
Spanish Royal Academy. I was thrilled to hear that they spent a great deal of
time reading and discussing a current newspaper that is published in Ladino.

I hesitantly stated that I sensed rhythms and images in the poetry of Federico
Garcia Lorca that reminded me of the Ladino material I had found in Baker
Library. He not only concurred with my observation about the relationship, but
he was also enormously impressed by my description of the wealth of material
available in a Yankee college in the frozen north. In the end he cited other
poets and writers, including himself, to whom the Ladino rhythms, forms, and
images became indigenous Hispanic characteristics. When one remembers that
there has been a considerable Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula since
biblical times (Jonah took ship around 8 B.C. to Tarshish, where he wished to
visit his coreligionists instead of obeying the Lord's command to preach in
Nineveh), one should not be surprised at the strength and influence of that
presence.

Conversely, it should not be surprising that the memory of Spain is firmly
anchored in the souls of the Sephardim. The following translation of parts of a
letter to Sr. Pulido from Enrique Bejarano, Director of the Spanish Israelite
School for Children in Bucharest, Rumania, is only a hint of the Sephardic
attachment to Spain. He writes, in 1904: `Endowed with a pure soul, a generous
heart, you, along with other friends of Spain, wish to encourage close
relationships with my brothers who were unjustly exiled from that sweet land of
friendly skies over four hundred years ago . . . Still today we silently suffer
this sad refrain filled with yearning:

. . the majority of those Jews speak Spanish more or less smoothly. They even
preserve the characteristics of their native land; the airs of an hidalgo; a
natural calmness and purity; the penetrating glance; the Spanish or Portuguese
charm; lastly, the inherited habits which their grandparents bred into them
with such
care, and let us add by saying, a solidarity and a reciprocating
affection.' 3

Until I read Sr. Pulido's book I had never known that Spain offered asylum to
the Jews expelled from Russia in 1881 by Czar Alexander III. Many applied at
the Spanish ministries in Saint Petersburg and Constantinople for asylum in
Spain. On 15 June 1881 the two ministries received the following telegram: `His
Majesty charges me to tell V.E. that His Majesty along with the Government
shall receive the Hebrews leaving Russia, opening to them the doors of their
ancient fatherland.' 4 Two days later Spain extended the offer to all
Jews refused asylum by Germany and the Balkan States. (One day I shall take a
holiday from Ladino and search for evidence of Sephardic efforts to return to
Spain after their expulsion.)

For the moment, I wish to make a few more comments about Ladino, the language.
First, I am convinced that it is a language and not a jargon. I always thought
that it was strange that most of the Yiddish speakers that I knew, including
members of my parents' generation, used to refer to their own language, which
already had a considerable body of literature, as a jargon, but used to
identify Ladino as the language of the Sephardim without any idea that there
was a very long history of Ladino literature.

Both languages, eleventh-century German and fifteenth-century Spanish, in their
time suffered phonetic distortions through the use of Hebraic characters in the
transliteration of the languages. Semitic alphabets do not readily lend
themselves as phonic equivalents to the Latin alphabet. For this paper I shall
use Ladino as the model for this problem. For example, in a letter to Sr.
Pulido from a Juan B. Sitges (1904) I quote: 'The surprising thing is that
those Jews who speak Castilian do not read it when it is written or printed in
contemporary characters, but to do it tin order to read it) it is necessary for
it to be in "rabbinic" characters (Hebraic), in which form it appears in
several newspapers.' 5

I offer here a few examples of the difficulties of preserving a mother tongue
at a distance from the source, which is hard enough with a common alphabet (for
example, Canadian French versus European French), but one can readily see by
the following what can happen in transliteration. In one of the letters
received by Sr. Pulido from a Sephardic friend we find the following: 'Si jamás yo
tubiese algo . . .' 'Tubiese' is the first person imperfect subjunctive of the
verb 'tener,' which should be spelled 'tuviese.' The problem here is that the
pronunciation of bs and vs in Spanish is hardly distinguishable, one from the
other, with one general exception. At the beginning of a word the b is hard, as
in the American word 'baseball.' In the middle of a word the b and the v are
softened greatly. The nearest Hebrew equivalent to the 'b as in baseball' sound
is the 'beth,' which never varies. The Hebrew 'double vahv,' or v sound, never
varies and is pronounced like an English v and can never be substituted for the
Spanish b or v. Therefore the writer of this letter must transliterate by using
the latin b, hence 'tubiese.'

Similarly, the phrase 'our father' in Ashkenazi Hebrew is pronounced 'ahveenu.'
The Ladino-Spanish vocabulary listing gives me 'abinu,' from which spelling I
must assume a Sephardic pronunciation using the 'beth,' or hard b. Finally, I
am slightly puzzled by the Ladino spelling for 'almuerzo' (lunch). It is
'almor&ccedil;o.' I don't think that I could justify my clumsy attempts to
reproduce the 'ue' sound in rabbinic letters well enough to make it a standard
phonetic device. There is no letter in the Hebrew alphabet that will reproduce
the Castilian zed, hence the substitution of the F with cedilla. Modern Hebrew
is based on Sephardic usage, making it tough for old time Ashkenazim like me.

By the late nineteenth century, Ladino had become quite adulterated by other
languages. Many educated Sephardim, other than the above-mentioned Enrique
Bejarano, constantly appealed for assistance in the preservation of 'Castilian
in exile' from individual Spanish friends. From my limited reading I assume
that all they ever received was a few grammars and some reading material. So
far I have Not seen anything definitive about cultural assistance to the
Spanish-hungry Sephardim from the Spanish government, or any arm of that
government.

However, Sr. Pulido, in a chapter intitled 'The French Language among
the Jews of the Middle East,' is sounding the alarm over the efforts of France
(through the Alliance Fran&ccedil;aise) to fill the vacuum left by Spanish
official neglect. Within this chapter Sr. Pulido includes a complete article
that appeared in Le monde illutrstré of 11 April 1903, sent to
him by a Sephardic friend. The article, entitled 'La Langue Fran&ccedil;aise en
Orient, Oeuvre scolaire de l'Alliance israélite,' enumerates a number of
schools funded by the Alliance. One of these, the school for boys in Tiberias
(1897), originally founded for the teaching of Torah, gradually introduced a
little science in the Hebrew lessons, then a little history, and one
day-apropos of a history lesson-a certain instructor told the students about
France, its history and its language; the latter, according to him, the
preferred 'civilized' language in Europe. From this beginning, the very
Sephardim who had vociferously fought the secularization of their Talmud school
themselves began to demand French lessons for their children. All religious
instruction continued in Hebrew.

In 1900 a similar school for girls was opened in Tiberias, giving the Alliance
320 students out of a total Sephardic population of 4, 000. In the area from
the sea of Marmora to the edges of Palestine, the Alliance developed
twenty-eight separate groups with a student total of 6,000. But
if one wishes to include similar schools in Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli,
Egypt, and European Turkey, and from Bulgaria and Persia, the number had risen,
in 1904, to 12 schools with 30,000 students. The annual cost was I,200,000
francs (quite a sum for those days), paid out of the coffers of the Alliance.
6

'This vast venture in education, from which we derive considerable benefit as a
moral influence, does not even cost one hundredth part of our national
budget.' 7 How far did this influence extend? These schools were
also attended by Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and sometimes Druse.
Considering these circumstances in the first years of this century, the
fidelity of the Sephardic Jew to his 'precious Sepharad' (Spain) is all the
more amazing.

I must add that when I spoke of this paper with a good friend and mentor on all
things Spanish, he told me that the descendants of those Arabs who were
expelled from Spain by Philip III between 1609 and 1614 also express their
longing for Spain in their literature and also identify themselves as Spanish.
This says a great deal for the feeling of loyalty to ancestral Spain on the
part of Arabs and Jews through the centuries.

The following is a translation from a statement by Rabbi Benito Garzón,
then the rabbi of the new synagogue in Madrid. The statement was made shortly
after 14 December 1968, the day on which the Jewish community in Spain received
official recognition as a practicing religious body in that country. In the
same document the edict of expulsion of 31 March 1492 was abrogated.

Since the pure Spanish scion of Judaism has again taken root in a land which
was the beacon of the Diaspora, the intellectuals of the South American
communities pause [here] in Madrid and come here to verify those traditions of
which they are the repositories. In a word, our role is to be a counterweight
to the various forms of a Judaism traumatized by history, and now the mission
of Sephardism is to demonstrate that it is good to be a Jew . . . Each week
there are Spaniards who, claiming Jewish origins, come to attend services on
Friday night, moved by a curiosity that they were Not able to anticipate just a
few years ago. 8

To that Damián Alonso adds, 'Spain thus repudiated a past filled with
anguish for the children of Israel and again opens its arms to re-embrace them
inside the national memory.' 9

In closing I must add that I did not have to look very deeply into Sephardic
history to discover cover that we Ashkenazim were unwittingly defined by their
singular history up to the years of the Holocaust.
I somehow doubt that the rest of the world is even aware of its own identity as
having been formed by two major events, the expulsion of 1492 and the 'Final
Solution' of the concentration camps.

My respect and love for good dictionaries comes from an early childhood in a
neighborhood in which I heard only Yiddish, Russian, and Italian. I heard my
first words in English on my very first day in school. Since then I have
experienced many painful, and often embarrassing, moments that taught me not to
have blind
faith in word-for-word translations or in word for word definitions in the
average
bilingual dictionary. My advice to all serious foreign-language students is to
shift
to a monolingual dictionary within the first year of a foreign-language course
if at all possible.

The following is a random example of how difficult it is to achieve perfect
alignment of primary concepts in meaning between an English word and its
alleged foreign equivalent. In my 1974 edition of the New Revised
Velázquez Spanish and English Dictionary I chanced on the word
'clapper' in the English-to-Spanish half of the book:

Clapper 1. Palmoteador, el que palmea o palmotea.
(Handclapper, he who slaps or claps)
2. Badajo de campana. (Bell striker)
In my Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary (1968 edition)
appears:
Clapper 1. The tongue of a bell.
2. Something that claps or clacks, as one of a pair of bones.

If the Primary definitions of a simple word are skewed, what can one believe
about more complex ideas? The answer for me was, of course, the Reference Room
and the stacks in Baker. The resources there were the best I could ever have
for my writing needs, but my subject matter made far greater demands, I also
needed cultural information beyond the graphic and performing arts.

It was a great surprise for me to stumble across a collection of books on the
Sephardic Jews, their history in and out of Spain, and their language, Ladino.
Happily I chose the Damián Alonso Garcia book for my first taste of this
material and so I suggest this book as an introductory study to anyone
interested, as a general review of most aspects of Sephardic history,
literature, and language. The fair-sized Ladino vocabulary to be found at the
back of this book has definitions of many of the puzzling words in Ladino
poetry.

Alonso's book led me to other, more specialized, works such as Cantos de
boda judeo-españolas (Madrid:1971) by Manuel Alvar López and
Endechas judeo-españolas (Granada: 1953), also by Manuel Alvar
López. I owe much to the latter two books for my enlarged understanding
and appreciation of the works of Federico Garcia Lorca.

Phonétique et phonogie du judeo-espagnol de Bucarest (The Hague
and Paris: 1971) by Marius Sala, is obviously very specialized, but I should
think that anyone raised in a multilingual household would find it very
fascinating. The Àngel Pulido y Fernández work from which I have
quoted at some length, Los israelitas españolesy el idioma castellano is very engaging because of its anecdotal style.
This work should be accessible to most students of Spanish.

The cultural information I wanted was selected from a vast collection of
nineteenth-and twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American sources, among
which were a number of small tracts on México: La rasa
cósmica, by José Vasconcelos (Paris: 192?);
Análisis del ser del mexicano, by Emilio Uranga (México :
1952), Variaciones sobre tema mexicano (México: 1952), by Luis
Cernuda; and the very fascinating El Laberinto de la soledad (various
editions) by Octavio Paz.

I have learned from my experiences with other languages that I have to move as
quickly as possible into the literature of a language in order to be able to
use any
dictionary properly. As a matter of fact, that was how my father learned
English
as an adult.

I found the staff in the Reference Room to be most helpful because they are so
knowledgeable. For me, writing is as demanding and unrelenting an activity as
working on a painting; therefore, I need a lot of security and confidence in my
sources, so I thank the staff for always pointing me in the right direction.

Throughout my research sessions for my lecture series I leaned rather heavily
on my friends in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of the College for
esoteric and specialized information. I have not had to depend on them
so much since Luis Villar joined the reference staff at Baker; he has been
invaluable for precise and succinct solutions to linguistic problems beyond the
scope of most grammars.